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/*
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 *
 * Copyright (c) 2002 World Wide Web Consortium,
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE.
 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
 */

package org.w3c.dom.xpath;


import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.DOMException;

/**
 * The <code>XPathExpression</code> interface represents a parsed and resolved XPath expression.
 * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/2002/08/WD-DOM-Level-3-XPath-20020820'>Document Object
 * Model (DOM) Level 3 XPath Specification</a>.
 */
public interface XPathExpression {

  /**
   * Evaluates this XPath expression and returns a result.
   *
   * @param contextNode The <code>context</code> is context node for the evaluation of this XPath
   * expression.If the XPathEvaluator was obtained by casting the <code>Document</code> then this
   * must be owned by the same document and must be a <code>Document</code>, <code>Element</code>,
   * <code>Attribute</code>, <code>Text</code>, <code>CDATASection</code>, <code>Comment</code>,
   * <code>ProcessingInstruction</code>, or <code>XPathNamespace</code> node.If the context node is
   * a <code>Text</code> or a <code>CDATASection</code>, then the context is interpreted as the
   * whole logical text node as seen by XPath, unless the node is empty in which case it may not
   * serve as the XPath context.
   * @param type If a specific <code>type</code> is specified, then the result will be coerced to
   * return the specified type relying on XPath conversions and fail if the desired coercion is not
   * possible. This must be one of the type codes of <code>XPathResult</code>.
   * @param result The <code>result</code> specifies a specific result object which may be reused
   * and returned by this method. If this is specified as <code>null</code>or the implementation
   * does not reuse the specified result, a new result object will be constructed and returned.For
   * XPath 1.0 results, this object will be of type <code>XPathResult</code>.
   * @return The result of the evaluation of the XPath expression.For XPath 1.0 results, this object
   * will be of type <code>XPathResult</code>.
   * @throws XPathException TYPE_ERR: Raised if the result cannot be converted to return the
   * specified type.
   * @throws DOMException WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR: The Node is from a document that is not supported by
   * the XPathEvaluator that created this <code>XPathExpression</code> . <br>NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR: The
   * Node is not a type permitted as an XPath context node or the request type is not permitted by
   * this <code>XPathExpression</code>.
   */
  public Object evaluate(Node contextNode,
      short type,
      Object result)
      throws XPathException, DOMException;

}
